Rick and Morty: how the world's most ingenious animation punk'd its fans

In the perfect April Fool’s Day stunt, followers of the cult animation got to watch a new episode for one night only – before it was yanked away for ever. It suited the show’s wicked, weird rug-pulling style to a T

Never mind the commercialisation of Christmas, what about April Fool’s Day? What was once just an excuse to stretch some cling film over the family toilet bowl has become a corporate arms race, with faceless multinationals suddenly straining to create some self-effacing but hopefully shareable content. That means Google Gnomes and Whopper-flavoured toothpaste.

Amid all this grasping corporate greenwash was one shining example of 1 April done right. Adult Swim, the nocturnal US channel specialising in often childish cartoons for grown-ups, junked their entire late-night schedule to show the Rickshank Rickdemption, a brand new episode of cult sci-fi show Rick and Morty. On repeat, all night. And then it was gone. Lost in time, like tears in rain (at least until season three returns officially in the summer).

For fans who have been clamouring for more Rick and Morty since its second season wrapped up 18 months ago, it was a surprisingly pleasant way to be punk’d. But in keeping with the flick-knife tone of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s OTT animated series, it seemed like a kindness delivered with a hint of cruelty: here’s that thing you asked for but enjoy it while it lasts because once it’s gone, it’s gone. (The episode was available to simultaneously stream online in some countries, but has now been yanked – although it wouldn’t take one of Rick’s portal guns to track it down online.)

When Rick and Morty debuted in 2014, it wasn’t hard to identify its inspiration: it was the central relationship of Back to the Future pumped full of ghoulish overkill. With his electroshock hair and booze-stained labcoat, the perma-burping codger Rick was an even more maniacal Doc Brown, his hapless grandson Morty a more fearful Marty McFly. Watching them go dimension-hopping through alien worlds via Rick’s magnificent inventions could easily have been a Gene Roddenberry-style sci-fi voyage filled with a sense of wonder. Instead, there have been genocides both accidental and deliberate, vicious alien intelligences and dystopias piled upon dystopias. It is wicked, transgressive fun.

Back to the Future pumped full of ghoulish overkill … Rick and Morty. Photograph: Adult Swim

In the typically glass-half-empty Rickshank Rickdemption, Rick was locked up inside his own mind by insectile interrogators while Earth was choking under the heel of the Galactic Federation. In a bit of particularly geek-friendly guest-casting, Rick’s interrogator was voiced by Firefly captain Nathan Fillion, geekdom’s second-favourite Han Solo.

Like Harmon’s previous live-action sitcom Community, Rick and Morty is saturated in pop-culture references, so innately aware of the usual genre tropes that it cannot help but acknowledge, ridicule and ultimately take a blowtorch to them. For a second, it looked as if the Rickshank Rickdemption might reveal the buried trauma that has shaped Rick into such a twisted old coot. But things are rarely that simple.

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Despite taking place in an expansive multiverse where the characters can theoretically go anywhere, the relative scarcity of Rick and Morty might actually be a key part of its appeal. The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park are all still reliably churning out new episodes. Even relatively new animated series seem to work on insanely productive schedules. If you only recently heard about the (excellent) Bob’s Burgers, you might be put off to discover that 120 servings already exist. In cultural conversation terms, Archer, the stylish Bond-meets-Mad-Men satire, still feels relatively “new”, and yet it is already on its seventh season.

Rick and Morty currently stands at two seasons of 21 short episodes (22 if you count the Rickshank Rickdemption). That doesn’t just seem bingeable, it seems cherishable. While it can often seem almost overstuffed with seemingly throwaway jokes and belching, if there is a throughline to Rick and Morty it is that actions have consequences, and there is a distinct sense of a continuous story being told. While it endlessly echoes the sort of classic Star Trek-style sci-fi that would carefully put all its toys back in the box at the end of each episode, Harmon and Roiland’s creation understands ramifications. When it debuted, it was compared to Family Guy but it is already something far, far greater than that. With its endless rug-pulling and inescapable sense of existential dread, it is an ingeniously serialised 21st-century equivalent of the Twilight Zone. Just with more belching.